It’s very old. Maybe Korean. Maybe Chinese. Make origami figures of what the dead person didn’t have in life. Send those things with the body into fire, into the next world. You create good luck for the next time.
Young Mr. Harney, King of the Circling Lab Stools, once-twice, always-in-motion. Never was there a student like that student, always watching while being watched. Newton’s laws embodied: What is in motion stays in motion unless acted upon, something can only touch and be touched. Kyle was amazing. Was.
In the dorm the older boys must have snuck into his cubby after lights-out or during the day when I wasn’t there. The report said he had bruises on his back, on his triceps, on his hamstrings, places concealed by Tim-Tim’s clothes. What types of boys pick on the smallest one? What type of school protects the strongest ones?
The best paper I’ve been saving, the gold leaf on crimson, the royal blue swans, even the hand-painted cranes dancing, and the hokey stuff that Americans think is super special, the thin paper with Escher drawings, even the cheap brown package wrap. I take it all down to the dining hall. Those faces the same in the stupid Wyeth mural all stare at me with my armload of paper rolls sticking out, walking up to one of the round tables, where nobody’s sitting. Bending at the waist, I dump all the paper rolls and scissors and rulers on the table. Young Sirs and Madams of Breakfast stare at me.
There aren’t assigned tables at breakfast. It’s cafeteria style, and students grab a plastic tray, slide it along chrome rails, and the African American kitchen staff in their white uniforms and hairnets serve fat spoonfuls of grits or oatmeal or eggs. The world is different this morning, but not breakfast. An orange juice glass with ridges for little people with little hands is silly on the orange tray.
A spoon tapping on my juice glass stops the few conversations.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I say to the masses, “good morning. After what happened last night, please join me in a ceremony.” All students turn toward me. “I invite you to fold origami cranes. The crane is a symbol of peace, and when someone dies, we place with the body the thing or things that person did not have in life. Mr. Harney did not have peace.”
Maggie Anderson raises her hand. Always the good girl.
“Yes, Miss Anderson.”
She puts her hand down, looks around before she says, “What’s origami?”
“I’ll show you. Please, anyone interested.”
The chairs skid on the floor. Students around the dining hall walk with slow steps. Maggie Anderson has pouches under her eyes, and her Irish skin is whiter than white. Shoulders are lower. This is shock.
Too much adrenalin in too-open veins, the students have flooded. They are fat with last night’s news. They are slow moving. Newton couldn’t calculate the total weight they bear. Not Cavendish.
“Take a piece of paper, or cut one from a roll,” I say. Students are two-deep to the table. They reach around each other and unfurl the rolls. There aren’t enough scissors. Usually students push each other around or make fun. This morning the world is different, and they wait.
“What size?” someone asks.
“Eight by eight,” I say. “And then make a crease down the middle to mark the center, and diagonally fold down the right side of the paper toward the front.”
I make the folds and hold them up. Some students move to other tables but keep an eye on me. Some kneel and squeeze their arms in between bodies so they can use the table to crease the paper.
In a classroom demonstrating anything, I have to get their attention again and again. This morning in the world that is different, they don’t talk. Masters and mistresses of listening, they fold. Without washing hands, without wiping hands on napkins, the students and I fold. We are tables of students bent over, folding paper to bring peace to a student who had none.
My mother and father and I sat at the breakfast table in our house in San Diego the morning after Kim died. The Formica table had shiny specks that caught the sun. The packages of paper were out when I got up, and my mother and I started before my dad got his coffee and sat with us. We didn’t talk.
One folds what the dead didn’t have. Husband. Coins. Car. House. Diploma. Good job. Blood that didn’t clot.
How does one fold these things?
Give me enough time and paper, and I can fold anything.
A piece of royal blue paper with gold-leaf junks, twelve by twelve inches, and I made Kim the house she never had. Windows and doors and two floors. Houses are cake. My father made a chest full of coins. My mother made Kim’s boyfriend. A wicker basket filled with origami, and we sent the basket with her body for cremation.
Not so easy are cranes for hands not used to folding. The cranes come out bent and stupid.
Sixth Formers and Second Formers and Third Formers fold. Each student who can make one shows another who struggles. Carla walks in, her way of walking, improbable that her body stays upright, that her rowing is so smooth. Her body and her movements are part of the past, the force of negative equally balanced and repelled by the positive. By nature, since she is the student, she is the positive. By nature, I am the negative. I am the keeper of distance. She goes to another table, stands with her hands on her hips, and knows exactly what to do. Carla doesn’t look at me. Not once.
In the letters she folded into envelopes this summer, Carla wrote that she was my chair. Now she’s the crane in every kid’s hands. What would each kid say to her, the crane in their hands? What would each crane say to Kyle?
When Kyle asked me to teach him to fold, I was a fool. Mr. Crap-on-My-Career, jealous of a Second Former, a boy with a crush on an older girl. Kyle, on top of his notebook, his grubby hands folding boats and bats, we sat on the bench outside, overlooking the lake. I became something besides skin drag. I was teacher. Carla became student, the object of another student’s desire, the girl a boy wants to make origami for.
Two nights ago in study hall, Kyle folded the box with the message, “Meet me in the cornfield before dinner. Donny Zurkus.” And I went to the cornfield to see who thought Donny Zurkus would appear. Kyle had made a box, a bat, and bluebird. He signed them all “Donny Zurkus,” but it was Kyle who came to the cornfield in between fifth period and dinner.
Geese love the cornfield. I do not love geese. Messy birds. Poor flyers. When I got near the cornfield, the sun was low on the horizon, the angle of light not isosceles. The woods made elongated shadows into the fields. Carla was past the shadows.
It made sense. She and the geese are good for each other, awkward in movement, keen sense of surroundings. She walked into the middle of the field right past Kyle. Maybe she’s not as keen as the geese.
“Boo!” went Kyle, right behind her. She jumped and yelled, and Kyle clapped. Carla’s long arms folding across her front. The look on her face, sure to say, “Back off.”
They talked in the field. One girl went to a cornfield to find Donny Zurkus and found Mr. Different instead. She talked with her arms crossed in front of her. He brought out a magnifying glass from his jacket, hunched over, turned circles, and spied the ground. She came to the field and found a weird, little boy who had given origami gifts and had a crush on her.
Two bodies exerting force on each other until imbalance breaks their attraction. Whatever they said to each other, I couldn’t tell. He kept in motion the whole time, a moon around Jupiter. But then he broke orbit, bounced up and down. He pulled something besides the magnifying glass out of his coat. He tossed it up in the air, turned about-face, and ran from the field. His hands were up in the air, and he yelled something over and over. Carla stood there. She stood there in the middle of the field. Another person broke orbit from her.
After talking to Carla, Kyle came to study hall, Mr. Happy. After study hall, Kyle went off to off himself. That’s what he told me he would do. That’s what he did.
When Tommy Underwood and Maggie Anderson finish folding at the dining table, they drop the cranes into the basket in the middle. Grease on their hands from breakfast spot the origami. No matter. From the other tables, other students reach over and drop theirs in the pile. Everyone but Carla. Crimson and blue and yellow and brown cranes spill over the basket in the middle of the table. They make more, and the table fills with cranes, big ones, little ones, bent ones, crisp ones.
The only person missing, the person who makes perfect cranes, is Kyle.